An artist’s depiction of Venus and, in the inset, phosphine molecules.
(© ESO/M. Kornmesser/L. Calçada & NASA/JPL-Caltech,)
What started as a stunning announcement that the chemical phosphine — a known byproduct of life — had been found in the clouds of Venus and could signal the presence of some lifeform has now been strongly critiqued by a number of groups of scientists. As a result, there is growing doubt that the finding, published in the journal Nature Astronomy in September, is accurate.
The latest critique, also submitted to Nature Astronomy but available in brief before publication, is led by NASA’s planetary scientist Geronimo Villaneuva and others at the Goddard Space Flight Center. They reanalyzed the data used to reach the conclusion that phosphine was present and concluded that the signal was misinterpreted as phosphine and most likely came instead from sulphur dioxide, which Venus’s atmosphere is known to contain in large amounts.
The title of their paper is “No phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus.”
Another paper led by Ignas Snellen from the Leiden Observatory came to a similar conclusion, but finding fault elsewhere. She and her team analyzed the data used in the initial research to see if cleaning up the noise with a 12-variable mathematic formula, as was used in the paper, could lead to incorrect results.
According to Snellan, using this formula actually gave the original team — false results and they found “no statistical evidence for phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus.”
While this critical research does not on its own disprove that phosphine exists in Venus’ atmosphere, it clearly raises doubts about original team’s conclusions.
That original team was lead by Jane S. Greaves, a visiting scientist at the University of Cambridge when when she worked on the phosphine finding. She herself has also has been unable to replicate the level of phosphine found by her team, and was a co-author on a paper that described that. It is now almost impossible to collect new data because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Venus is roughly the size of Earth but much hotter due to its huge concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. (NASA)
This intense scrutiny continues as staff at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, discovered a separate, unspecified issue in the data that were used to detect the phosphine. “There are some issues with interpretation that we are looking at,” says Dave Clements, an astrophysicist at Imperial College London and co-author of the original study.… Read more
